Debate over $167 housing stipend for medical residents stalls talks between guild, UC Davis
A disagreement over how much UC Davis Medical Center will pay to offset housing costs has stalled contract talks between the hospital and nearly 800 residents, fellows and interns who formed a union more than a year and half ago.
The union is seeking an annual stipend of $5,500, while the hospital has offered $2,000, or about $167 a month. That lags behind what other UC medical schools provide and would make it difficult to recruit and retain low-income students and students of color, said organizers from the local labor union Committee of Interns and Residents.
To “residents of color, first-generation students whose parents don’t come from a good financial background or have lower socio-economic status, this matters,” said Anokh Sohal, a second-year resident in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “Not being able to say you have a good contract that’s fair and equitable, that has deterred a lot of residents of color from the program.”
Steve Telliano, spokesman for UC Davis Health, said the hospital’s total compensation level excluding housing is the second-highest of UC schools.
“To show residents we know they are important and valued,” the hospital system has provided residents with a 7% pay increase in the last year, he said in a statement, with a proposal to increase pay another 5% in July.
First-, second- and third-year medical residents make between $61,300 and $65,800 annually, according to UC Davis Health’s most recent salary table.
Medical residents often do the same work as staff nurses and doctors, including intubating patients, delivering babies or responding to emergency calls at night, said Zola C. Quao, a third-year resident in the combined family medicine and psychiatry program. Many work second jobs on off-hours and weekends at community clinics to support themselves and pay off student debts, she said.
“The hospital uses us as cheap labor,” Sohal said. “Residents are some of the most overworked and exploited labor in the hospital system.”
Quao said the drawn-out bargaining has been particularly demoralizing for residents, fellows and interns who have served the public throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s generally frustrating to see the administration see the work you do, know it’s valuable, and be capable of ... compensating the work and sacrifice, and saying, ‘We just don’t want to do that,’ ” she said.
Comparing housing costs
Sacramento rents have soared in the last year, rising faster than all but five cities in the country. The median rent for a 1-bedroom apartment in Sacramento, is about $1,435, according to Zumper, an online rental marketplace.
For staff who need to be within 15 minutes away from the hospital to respond to emergency calls, Sohal said, neighborhoods near UC Davis Medical Center like midtown and Oak Park are even more expensive. Rents for a studio apartment near the medical center are as high as $1,800, Quao said. “I already pay over 40% of my monthly take home on a studio.”
The union and the hospital have held over 30 bargaining sessions in a year and a half.
The hospital is hopeful of reaching an agreement, Telliano said, “but we remain fairly far apart on several core issues, most notably the union’s demand that UC Davis pay housing costs for these doctors at San Francisco or Los Angeles rates.”
The $5,500 stipend proposed by the union would cover about 32% of the cost to rent a median 1-bedroom apartment in Sacramento. At least three other UC schools pay a similar percentage:
UC San Francisco’s stipend is $13,200, which covers about 31% of the rent cost of a median 1-bedroom apartment in San Francisco pre-COVID.
UCLA’s stipend is $12,000, which covers more than 40% of the median rent in the area before the pandemic.
UC Irvine’s stipend is $8,000, which covers about a third of the cost of rent for a median 1-bedroom apartment.
Impact on students of color
The effects of the ongoing contract negotiations have already impacted UC Davis’s enrollment of students of color, organizers said. Sohal said in addition to the housing stipend, the union is still working to put language affirming commitments to enrolling and retaining a diverse group of medical students into the contract.
Currently, about 37.3% of the School of Medicine’s enrollment are a member of underrepresented groups — Hispanic, Black, American Indian, Alaskan Native or Asian Pacific Islander.
During the school’s most recent “Match Day” in March, when medical students choose where they will become medical residents, “we received the overwhelming majority of our first-choice residents for the coming year, and those students selected to come to UC Davis as well,” Telliano said in a statement. It’s evidence, he said, that “what we are currently doing is working well.”
“These are real results which dispute the hypothetical theories raised by the union,” he said in a statement.
In the backdrop of ongoing contract negotiations is a major $3.75 billion expansion project announced by UC Davis Health in February to rebuild and expand the Sacramento hospital buildings and meet state seismic standards.
This story was originally published April 14, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Debate over $167 housing stipend for medical residents stalls talks between guild, UC Davis."